"Baw, baw ! You leave me forever! I keel myself!" He made a quick swing around a lamppost and then returned to his quest. "Hey, Benny, when you kiss your girl, do your noses get in the wav?" " N . d " O d B 1 ever mln, Sal enny. "Ha, you don't even know! You never even kissed her, I bet. " Benny said sharply, "Don't worry, kid, I kissed her, all right." "Do you push her down? n "What do you mean, push her down?" "Like in the movies, the man always pushes them down on something. Do you do that?" "What do you care?" "I care, I care. Y ou know how the girl in the movies says, 'Do you ca-a-a-are, da-a- a-arling? Do you ca-a-a-are? ,,, "Do me a favor and go on home, F redo." "Tell me about when you kiss your gid friend and maybe I will," said Freda insincerely. .. -- . 43 B ENNY'S vision of the epochal Flo- regaining coffee table was being dimmed by Fredo's needling and by the loose-ended lives he had encountered. Screwing up his resolve agaInst these in- roads upon hIs table-making intentions, Benny now marched straight to the lumber store, whIch was In a side-street warehouse. A dozen other customers, all men, were there, keeping their eyes cIrcumspectly on the floor, the ceil- ing, the building materials, or their drawings for do-it-yourself projects, carefully avoiding each other's gaze. l hert was an air of secrecy, as if each man were carrving blueprints for the world's first hundred-man spaceship. There would be an awesome number of bookcases going up on the \Vest Side this weekend. Each would-be carpenter served notice of his separateness by lodging himself in a corner or alongside a barricade formed by piles of lumber, plywood, composition board, cement blocks, or bricks. Ends of two-by-fours lanced out at head level across an alley- way of varnish barrels. Boards clattered and bonked as the two dealers in the store filled orders. Expectancy had sub- dued Fredo; for a while he only tugged disconsolate I} at Benny's sleeve, but then he took off on an inspection tour. The smell of sawdust, the resIny flavor of fresh-cut white pine, the woodsiness in all the wood struck Ben- ny as pleasant, but the novelty of it ((Well, I see my ttme's about up " . troubled him, for it showed him to bt a stranger here, and he wondered if, after all, he would be able to make a good table. Wood was strange com- pany for Benny, Benny being made of old car parts, wIth carbon monoxide for breath. Benny was full of steel and grease and oil-iron filings and ball bearings and nuts and bolts, rusty fend- ers and bent bumpers, and the viscous insides of clogged radiators. His nose knew the stink of rubber braked on hot, softening asphalt. Benny was made of jagged shards of broken safety glass, prickly ends of broken-off connecting wires, burnt-out sparkplugs, acid-eaten gaskets. But wood r New, fresh wood? He sniffed the air experimentally in thIS northern outpost. One of the lumber dealers was stocky and had thinning red hair; the other was skinny, wIth a greenish complexion and a bushy black mustache. A froglike, hun-haired woman perched on a high stool dt a cashier's desk behind a win- dow. Benn} spoke to the red-haired dealer as he brushed past: "Can vou cut up wood to a pattern?" "V\'" ait your turn, will you, Mister?" "I'm just asking. If you can't cut it, maybe I don't want it." "If we can't cut it, maybe you don't want it," the dealer repeated, and van- ished into a wall of lumber. From across the room, the other, mustached dealer called out to Benny, "W e can cut it any way you like, Mis- ter. " "Maybe you can," the red-haired . dealer replied belligerently from his hid- ing place among the boards. "I get this order filled, I'm closing up. It's noon al- ready." " s ., ". d h h o It s noon, sal t e mustac e. "What I want," Benny explained, turning from the blank pile of lumber to the mustache and back again, "is a board for a tabletop cut with three cir- cles on the corners." The red-haIred dealer came out of the wood. "I suppose you know what you're talking about," he said to Benny. The mustache came over to defend Benny. "Yeah, Pete, maybe he does know what he's talking about." He turned to Benny . "You want some- thing like a trefoil?" "A trefoil is a hole, damn it," said Pete. Benny was amazed that his modest idea for ace-of-clubs-shaped table cor- ners should have an officIal name, but the idea of the hole threw him off. " Th ' I . " B . d at s not exact y It, enny sal " W ' h . d e can t get to 1m to ay any- " . d P way, Sal ete. "You're sure in a bIg hurry," the mustache said to him. "Yeah, I'm in a hurry. Every week it's the same thing, they've got the whole week to come in here, but no, it's got to be Saturday morning. I'm clos- ing up. Tell them to come back next Saturday. Make sure it's five minutes to t-welve on Saturday." "We'll take care of them right now," the mustache said firmly. Silently and fervently, the customers encouraged